Capturing a scoop on tape as it's actually unfolding is every reporter's dream. Judith Kampfner succeeded in doing just that in The French Ball. She was in the New York Public Library, patiently watching the Chekhovian historian and translator Peter Constantine leaf through piles of old magazines, looking for untranslated short stories by the great Russian author.

After the revolution, the Bolsheviks, desperate for foreign currency, sold a vast quantity of archive material from the Leningrad Library to America, much of which is tied up in bundles with the original string, still waiting to be catalogued. This particular bundle consisted of humorous magazines from the 1880s, similar to Punch or the New Yorker , to which Chekhov, who was then studying medicine, submitted stories under pseudonyms such as Man Without a Spleen and My Brother's Brother.

Constantine has been sifting through the magazines for days, commenting occasionally on other articles, political cartoons and ads for galoshes. You can hear library noises in the background. 'So we're now up to 1884,' he says. 'And here's a story by Chekhonte A, another pseudonym, called "The French Ball" and I'm in shock because I don't recognise the title.' 'What is it about?' asks Judith. Constantine, who can speak 27 languages, says he hasn't quite finished it but it seems to be a social comedy about a St Petersburg journalist. Chekhov would have been 24 when he wrote it. In something of a daze, Constantine goes off to look up the catalogues to see whether it's known in English. When he comes back, he says nervously: '"The French Ball" is in none of the bibliographies. I'm trying to be calm but I'm sort of falling apart.'

OK, this isn't John Simpson liberating Kabul but in literary terms, it's like finding an unpublished Shakespeare sonnet. Not only has 'The French Ball' never been translated, but it isn't included in any of the Chekhov bibliographies in Russia or the US. Nor is it in the complete works, which run to 30 volumes, and the author doesn't mention it in any of his letters. This is a genuine 24-carat solid gold scoop.

It's also Chekhov as we rarely see him, in surreal mode imagining pink jelly pouring into his room through all the cracks and little people riding tiny horses with ducks' heads. It sounded suspiciously like 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' to me but the professors of Russian literature, to whom our tireless reporter later spoke, were wildly enthusiastic about the new light it throws on the full canon of Chekhov's literature. I'm wildly enthusiastic about this genuine radio first.

Commission three women from three different countries to write plays about war and you'd think the end result might be a vaguely connected trilogy. Think again. War Zone demonstrated how vastly different the creative process can be within a comparatively limited framework. Before each performance, the playwrights, from Croatia, Algeria and Germany, talked about their work, which I always think is a bit of a cop-out. Play first, explain later. If they're awarding points, I'm bound to say that the one from Germany, Splinters by Dea Loher, about soldiers, casualties and war photographers, was the most powerful, mainly because it included music. I know this is Radio 3, where entertainment is supposed to make you work, but sometimes the obvious has its advantages.

You always know where you are with Radio 4 plays. Paris, in the case of Mark Lawson's The Man Who Had 10,000 Women, because it was about George Simenon, who created Maigret. It was fast, funny and full of good jokes, like the one about Noël Coward telephoning Simenon and being told that M Simenon was not taking any calls until he'd finished writing his latest book. 'I'll hang on then,' said Coward.

About this article

Radio: A gem from the Man Without a Spleen

This article appeared on p11 of the Observer Review section of the Observer
on Saturday 30 November 2002.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 18.03 EST on Sunday 1 December 2002.
It was first published at 18.03 EST on Saturday 30 November 2002.